Sig Christenson is a veteran military reporter who has made nine trips to the war zone. He writes regularly for Hearst about service members, veterans and heroes, among other topics. He is also the co-founder and former president of Military Reporters and Editors, founded in 2002.

Families

06/29/2014

SAN ANTONIO — For the parents of U.S. service men and women who died in Iraq's long war, the latest news about advances by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is a trigger for powerful memories and a sense of profound loss.

At kitchen tables, in their living rooms and on visits to the cemeteries where their children rest under white marble headstones, the stories of Iraq's disintegration spark long talks, anger, tears and even laughter.

But they also share a dreadful, sinking feeling that things will get so bad in Iraq that President Barack Obama will yield to critics calling on him to save that nation, even if it means sending thousands of troops back.

02/28/2013

AUSTIN — The entire family drove from San Antonio to Austin to bid farewell to Sgt. 1st Class Mario Orta as he readied to leave Texas for Kuwait.

Flanked
by UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, Orta's wife, three children, mother
and grandmother sat on metal risers with hundreds of others in a hangar
as prayers were said and patriotic songs played.

“I get real sad,” Maria Orta said of her son. “He's a part of me.”

Tearful
goodbyes at ceremonies like these have become a ritual of war for
American troops and their families since 9/11. But the 500-plus soldiers
and families who converged on Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to salute the 449th Aviation Support Battalion were part of an event that is going to become increasingly rare.

Shrinking
defense budgets, the looming sequester and the troop drawdown in
Afghanistan will transform active-duty and reserve component forces.
What comes next isn't clear, but some in the National Guard fear a
return to an era when it had inferior equipment and few opportunities to
prove its worth to the Pentagon.

“They
value us, but money's going to get tight and what we've seen in the
past is when the active gets cut, the guard gets cut, and when there's
limited resources they'll go to the active-duty first and the guard
second,” explained the Texas Guard's adjutant general, Maj. Gen. John Nichols, a member of the Air National Guard since 1992.

“The last time we had a drawdown, relations between the Army and the Army National Guard were quite contentious,” said John Goheen, a spokesman for the National Guard Association of the United States. “When resources become constrained, the battles for resources get tough.”

A
strategic reserve during the Cold War, the guard emerged as an
operational force after 9/11. Nichols said the Pentagon is crafting
plans to send the guard to places like South Korea once every five years
or have part-time troops ready for national disasters.

In the
last decade, Texas Guard, the nation's largest at 22,710 troops, has
been an A-team player. It has sent 32,127 soldiers and airmen overseas,
and in that time, 16 soldiers have died in combat. The last killed was
Staff Sgt. Nelson David Trent, 37, of Round Rock, who died in December in a roadside bombing near Kandahar.

Today,
a San Antonio-based medical evacuation company that flew mercy missions
in Iraq in 2008 is in Afghanistan. D Company, 3-144th Infantry has 200
GIs pulling airfield security. The 136th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade's
189 soldiers handle logistics and communications for bases around Kabul.

But
fewer guardsmen are at war. The number deployed in December, 16,383
soldiers, was 40 percent under three years ago. And where 3,000 Texans
went on a single mission to Iraq in 2004, 1,298 soldiers in 14 units
will deploy between now and next year, with one intelligence unit
consisting of just six GIs.

“Deployments are going to be small, they're going to dwindle down,” said Command Sgt. Maj. Jose Cazares,
53, of San Antonio. “And compared with the amount of deployments we've
had in the past, it's getting to the point where for many of our
soldiers it may be the first and last deployments of their career.”

07/27/2012

The wife of Luis A. Walker, who was convicted this week of sexual offenses with 10 trainees, says people are wrong about her man.

The former boot camp trainer at the center of an Air Force sex scandal isn't a rapist or a sexual predator, Yeimi Walker said. He doesn't belong behind bars or on a sex offender registry, she said. He should be on the job.

For reasons she can't fathom, 10 women lied about her teenage sweetheart, who triumphed over a bad neighborhood in the Brooklyn borough of New York and fulfilled his dream of being in the Air Force.

“I don't understand why it's happening. I just know that I believe him 100 percent, and I believe they put an innocent man in jail,” Walker said, describing her husband as a dedicated father and NCO who loved the uniform. “I'm still in shock. I don't know how this happened, how this came about.”

Days after a military jury at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland convicted Walker on all counts and gave him 20 years in prison, his wife said she understands the Air Force has a problem. Her husband's case is the biggest of six in which instructors face sexual misconduct charges.

But Walker, whose name is pronounced as “Jay-me,” is baffled that he came out on the losing end of a trial that she said had no evidence — no DNA, no eyewitnesses, videotapes or written records. It doesn't seem possible the Air Force would railroad an innocent man, she said, but media coverage and the witnesses hurt badly.

“I may be biased, but these women were caught in lies and they just let it be,” Walker, 25, said. “My husband did not get a fair trial, and I think the military is trying to prove a point. They're trying to make an example out of him.”